A U.S. patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor(s), issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself, “the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling” the invention in the United States or “importing” the invention into the United States.
The earliest patent statutes imposed no duty on a patent owner to mark articles. However, the Patent Act of 1842 required the patent owner to mark each product, and failure to do so resulted in a fine of not less than one hundred dollars. The required mark was the date of the patent. The Patent Act of 1861 changed the marking requirement, eliminating the fine for failure to mark and instead establishing a rule much like the current rule, where failure to mark relieves an infringer of liability for conduct prior to the date of actual notice. The Patent Act of 1927 did, however, change the required mark to the word “patent” and the patent number. The marking provision of the Patent Act of 1952 left the marking requirement largely unchanged except to permit the abbreviation “pat.” in place of “patent”.
A patentee who makes or sells patented articles, or a person who does so for or under the patentee, is thus required to mark the articles with the word “patent” or “pat.” and the number of the patent. The penalty for failure to mark is that the patentee may not recover damages from an infringer unless the infringer was duly notified of the infringement and continued to infringe after the notice.
If a patent owner sells a product covered by the patent that has not been marked with the patent number in a way that satisfies the statute, then an infringer starts accruing damage liability only from the date of actual notice to the infringer. The date of actual notice to the infringer may be, for example, the date of filing of a patent infringement complaint, or possibly, of correspondence with the accused infringer.
Thus, a patent owner who sells a patented product but does not mark it may be understood to have led the public to believe that it is not patented. Thus, a patent owner who fails to mark cannot be heard to complain for damages if a member of the public who has not been given actual notice of the patent chooses to copy the product.
Many computer-based systems, such as measurement, control, analysis, machine vision, and instrumentation systems, among others, may include a variety of resources, i.e., components or sub-systems, to perform various tasks. These resources may include hardware devices, software programs, and/or hardware configuration programs. For example, a measurement system may include one or more sensors coupled to the computer, one or more expansion cards comprised in the computer, such as data acquisition (DAQ) cards, and image acquisition (IMAQ) cards, etc., and various software programs, including application programs and drivers, for processing and/or analyzing measurement data. The measurement system may also include a programmable hardware element, e.g., a field programmable gate array (FPGA), configured with a hardware configuration program.
Each of these resources may include patented technologies, i.e., features which are covered by one or more patents. Generally, for products such as the resources described above, patent information is marked either on the product itself, e.g., on a computer card or computer disc (e.g., a CD-ROM), or on the packaging of the product. In many cases, the patent marking information may not be easily visible, and in some cases, may not be visible at all. For example, if a computer card is installed in an expansion slot inside the chassis of the computer system, then the patent mark(s) may be effectively hidden from view once the card is installed. Similarly, once a software program has been installed on a computer system, any patent marking on the packaging or on the disc may not be available for viewing by a user of the computer system. Similarly, for an FPGA configured with a hardware configuration program, patent marking information may not be readily viewed.
Furthermore, many computer systems may be maintained by a system administrator. Thus the administrator may configure hardware and software for various users' computer system. In this case, a user may not be aware of some of the resources coupled to or installed on the computer system, and thus, may not be able to ascertain patent marking information for the resources.
For software programs that include patented technology, another patent marking method is to display the patent marking information in the software. For example, the patent marking information may appear in a menu item of the software program (e.g., the About Box) or during installation and/or start up of the program. One problem with this method is that there may be no standardized location for patent marking information among various software programs. In addition, in many instances, software programs may be downloaded and installed on the user's machine with little or no notice to the user, or may be installed by an administrator without the user's knowledge. Thus the user may not know to look for patent marking information for this software. Further, many software programs execute invisibly to the user, e.g., with no graphical user interface, and hence, patent marking information cannot readily be displayed to the user. For hardware devices, patent marking information may be included in the corresponding software driver, if one is available. However, in most instances the software driver executes invisibly to the user. For hardware configuration programs, patent marking information may be difficult to display.
Thus, improved systems and methods are desired for retrieving and displaying patent marking information for software and hardware resources coupled to or comprised in a computer system.